The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Demons sewn up, tied down

It exists; but in-the-world? Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911

We are in a
strange condition, sethren.The sun
shines and the breezes blow, like blades from the east.Birds fly past, a magpie with a twig, a coal
tit with a sprig of down.They too are
driven by deep evolved currents to do things, mate, build nests, in circumstances
which make them look deranged.Just up
the road to the south, the snowdrifts are eight feet deep.

When I was a
young man, south of the Equator, my veranda was on the edge of the high savannah,
and I would watch these little olive birds the size of my finger hopping and
creeping through the mopani and bauhinia trees.Willow warblers.Three of them flew all the way from sub-equatorial
Africa to Huddersfield last week, and were creeping and darting about the
alders the other side of the millpond across from the retreat where we Brothers
watch by night.These three little birds
had arrived just in time for the blizzard.When spring does come, and the last snow with its border of blue lace of
ice under the May sky shrinks to spikey green, we’ll see their little corpses
there, rich olivaceous down a muddy pulp.What is evolved cannot tell the future.

That is selection,
sethren, no more and no less.With
willow warblers, each death is the end of a line which is absolutely unbroken
from the first life three and a half billion years ago.That’s a long time for phut! Out for
ever.As if it were the commonest thing
in the world.When the old people say, “Where
have the manners gone, all this swearing, some self-entitled fuck in a Range
Rover parked in the disabled spot at Sainsbury’s?” that’s the answer.Gone with those willow warblers.

The upside
is that those willow warblers which might have had a tendency to migrate early
won’t get layed and they won’t get hatched.The downside, given increasing climate instability, is that the ones
that were selected by the meteorological environment this year, because their
parents migrated late, will tend to arrive late next year, just in time for the
mid-April second winter after the March heatwave.

Evoculture is very good at foresight, as long as it doesn’t involve
something cataclysmic, like climate instability. In
Evoculture, weather forecasts have evolved.

Oh, I know,
sethren, you may say, weather forecasting is not an insentiently evolved thing,
it is an act of human thought, an act of cognition.It is not.What do you or I understand of weather and the climate, sethren?Absolutely fuck all.It is something on the telly, predominantly
blue on the BBC, with lines with red triangles on them and circles with numbers
and cartoon rain.Beyond those is an uncountable
multitude of demons, a huge host that have been in and out of a billion brains
on the way, from Yahweh the storm god fighting the monster of the deep and long
before that, to the pin-point accuracy of in
fifteen minutes the temperature on the Huddersfield ringroad will be 0o
and the wind due east at 16 mph, cloud cover with patchy sun.The present science of weather forecasting is
so complex, composed of so many demons and alliances of alliances to several
orders of magnitude of demons, that one could spend a lifetime anatomising it
and the job not half done.That is why,
just for the sake of practical economy, we need a map, a taxonomy, a
hierarchy.And that will come, sethren.

But for now
we need to tie up the loose ends of demons.What makes demons difficult is that you can’t pin them down.They are, in the final analysis, locations of
energy, and the signature of this energy varies according to where it exists at
any given instant.And just because it
moves, that is to say exists in a new place, that doesn’t mean it ceases to
exist in the previous place.It can move
on, a thousand times a second, leaving itself behind a thousand times.Nipple.Sethren here before my eyes, with traffic, a Metro bus, one of those
cement mixer lorry things, moving behind you, think of the path of that demon to
your own neural substrate; to the part of the continuum of the universe
which is your brain, your ideoverse; to the locus of the stable cycle of energy that is the irreducible difference
between nipple and large hadron collider, or between nipple and wheel.The demon must have had some existence
everywhere along that long and complex journey, otherwise it could not have
arrived.And it also remained in my
head, where it started.And suppose you asked
yourself, “What did he say. Did he really say Nipple, and quite loudly given the conformation of a young lady who
was just getting off the 316 from Holmfirth at the time?” and you turned to
your neighbour and mouthed, but did not voice, “Nipple?”Think of the further journey of the demon.By way of the electromagnetic spectrum and
your neighbour’s eyes.And think in that
journey of all the places the demon has been, and all the places it still
remains.

Highly distributed, that’s what demons are.And not just in the way I’ve just said, but
also around and about what’s in the world.Demons that ally with things could not exist without the things
themselves.An actual needle is a locus
of the demon needle.And what, I hear
you cry, not distracted for an instant by the hunger rattling in your bellies,
of the square root of minus one?That
does not exist anywhere out in the world.

But of course it does.√-1.There it is.And not just there either, but in a million books, on screens, in
Wikipedia, on whiteboards in schools and colleges all over the world.Angels likewise.

So what’s a demon?A demon
is something that must be able to exist, multiply and distributed, in the world
and in the human neural substrate.In
the neural substrate, it is a stable cycle of energy in the part of the
continuum of the universe which is the human brain. It is the irreducible
difference between something and anything else.And in the world it must at any point have some physical existence; as
energy, like nipple travelling between your lips and your neighbour’s eyes; or
as a thing, like a bag or a knife or a brick.

Okay, a bit rough and ready, but it’ll have to do.Tomorrow, the rest of the taxonomy. But still
it snows.To ward of hypothermia alone,
we need transfatty gloop to burn.We
need MadamMiMi’sMagicMeatyBits. I shall lead the charge.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.